The Gift of Introversion
The Gift of Introversion
The Gift of Introversion
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Early Trait Research<br />
In 1884, Sir Francis Galton was the first person who is known to have investigated the<br />
hypothesis that it is possible to derive a comprehensive taxonomy <strong>of</strong> human personality<br />
traits by sampling language: the lexical hypothesis. In 1936, Gordon Allport and S.<br />
Odbert put Sir Francis Galton's hypothesis into practice by extracting 4,504 adjectives<br />
which they believed were descriptive <strong>of</strong> observable and relatively permanent traits from<br />
the dictionaries at that time. In 1940, Raymond Cattell retained the adjectives, and<br />
eliminated synonyms to reduce the total to 171. He constructed a self-report instrument<br />
for the clusters <strong>of</strong> personality traits he found from the adjectives, which he called<br />
the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire. Based on a subset <strong>of</strong> only 20 <strong>of</strong> the 36<br />
dimensions that Cattell had originally discovered, Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal<br />
claimed to have found just five broad factors which they labeled: "surgency",<br />
"agreeableness", "dependability", "emotional stability", and "culture". Warren Norman<br />
subsequently relabeled "dependability" as "conscientiousness".<br />
Hiatus in Research<br />
For the next two decades, the changing zeitgeist made publication <strong>of</strong> personality<br />
research difficult. In his 1968 book Personality and Assessment, Walter<br />
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